From This Day Forward...

“From this day forward… ‘til death do us part”
She could never have imagined what her words ordained…
Did she know what was in store when she first tried to shake off the thought “You’re going to marry that boy” as she eye balled an awkward towheaded scrawny guy trying to impress her with lame humor? Could she have anticipated the consequences?

The hardships of serving as sole bread-winner during those early years of training…
Teaching smelly third-graders, creating a home on a shoe-string, preparing meals, late-night lesson plans, surviving the flu, long lonely hours while her husband buried himself in medical books…
Nine full months of vomiting, walking an icy sidewalk while in labor, excruciating birth pangs, sleepless nights, colic, dirty diapers, living on borrowed money…
Adapting to inner city life, tracing helicopter spot lights overhead, enduring burglaries, fending off a vicious canine with babe in arms, surviving a house fire…
The rigors of residency, lungs laden with southern California smog, widow to the every third night call schedule, another nine months of vomiting, sore breasts, dirty diapers…
Suffering a brush with death due to meningitis, forced to recover quickly to save her small children from the care provided by a professionally distracted husband…
Then learning to live in the shadow of her husband’s new career, swallowing hard as he is adored and praised while she must be satisfied with his leftovers, aware of his warts…
Learning to serve as solo manager of household and family (and another “surprise” nine months of nausea), providing microwave meals to her late-night husband…
Silently adjusting to the unique compromises of the “doctor’s wife”, constantly sharing him with other women who bare their souls and their bodies in his presence…
Dramatic changes in her husband’s career uproot her from her dream home on the lake, familiar surroundings and lifetime friends; a subsequent series of biennial moves stretch her ability to cope with change…
The children grow, she launches a real estate career to support their college education, the nest empties…
Her roles as wife, matriarch, confidant, counselor, spiritual mentor, gourmet cook, perpetual hostess, never end and expand to enfold a larger church family…
She survives hurricanes, shares in the heartache of her daughters’ miscarriages, suffers the loss of a loving pet…
Then at the cusp of a promising season of ease, the news that her husband has malignant melanoma that is already rampant throughout body and brain…
While her future security is threatened, she becomes fulltime nurse and constant companion, endures more sleepless nights, witnesses his wasting while she coaxes him to eat, massaging swollen legs, reading to him for encouragement and comfort, all without complaint…

Could she ever have foreseen what those vows would bring her way, “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health…”?
Yet her life of devotion and over-coming endurance flows not from a sense of obligation to a covenant – rather from a fathomless heart of self-giving love that this heart is still studying and aspiring to emulate. Her vows and her subsequent faithfulness flow from a capacity to love that astounds and confounds me, and inspires me to be more than I am.

My dearest Linda, this scrawny guy’s highest aim: to love you in kind
Dan